Court Rejects Broad Definition of ‘Autodialer’ Under TCPA

The United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida recently addressed a critical threshold issue in cases brought under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act arising out of text messages or calls to cellphones: what constitutes an “automatic telephone dialing system” (commonly referred to as an “autodialer”).

In De Los Santos v. Millward Brown Inc., the court rejected the broad interpretation of the phrase “automatic telephone dialing system” favored by the plaintiff-side TCPA class action bar. Rather than finding that an autodialer is any equipment that can dial a list of numbers without human intervention, the court held that an autodialer must have the present capacity to generate random or sequential telephone numbers.

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